Quotes by : Mike Jay

Haslam leaves us in no doubt what we are supposed to make of Matthews' mental world: this is gibberish....

Come the revolution, however, mesmerism was reconceived once more. From its beginnings many had seen....

As a pauper, the obvious destination for James Tilly Matthews was the Bethlem Hospital, already long....

To look back before 1800 is to enter another world, one where the number of institutions for the mad....

The Bedlam that greeted James Tilly Matthews, then, was not so much a baroque spectacle of depravity....

The French army had crowned a campaign of extraordinary successes by defeating the Austrians at Jemappes....

The French revolution, he concluded, had not produced any new principles of truths, merely a mass of....

The Air Loom, if Matthews revealed its existence under questioning, would now be recognised immediately....

Up to this point, it was rare for the mad to be distinguished from the poor, the homeless, the indigent,....

We think of 1789 as the date of the French Revolution, and the storming of the Bastille as its defining....